“But what does that have to do with us”? : Anthropophagic routes in the column “Thursdays street market”

Abstract

Between 1926 and 1927, years that precede the launching of the Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibalist Manifest], Oswald de Andrade kept a weekly column in the Jornal do Commercio, São Paulo edition, published every Thursday with the title “Feira das Quintas” [“Thursdays street market”]. The articles mostly covered facts or themes from that period, frequently including, in the same column, debates on various topics, as if the reading was analogous to a walk among different stands in a street market. The topics included the cultural program of the São Paulo State capital, comments about public works, the passing of Hollywood stars, heated controversies against the leaders of the Movimento Verde-Amarelo [Green and Yellow Movement] (Menotti del Picchia, Plínio Salgado e Cassiano Ricardo), among others. As for the genre, the texts are a hybrid of chronicles and short stories, some containing fictional dialogues amid debates about facts of the week, others entirely dedicated to fictional narrative. The column was a place for experimentation, which the writer used to elaborate ideas and intellectual operations that, later, would be recaptured in the Manifesto Antropófago. This article discusses some fragments of three columns of “Thursdays street market”, interlacing them with excerpts from the manifest, calling attention to the way Oswald de Andrade criticizes the aesthetic taste of his contemporaries and puts Brazil’s colonial artistic and architectonic past in relation to some of the great monuments of the Western civilization. The hypothesis supported here is that the way the writer deals with both of these issues points to an urgency, essential to the anthropophagic project, of repositioning Brazilian historical and artistic imagination against Eurocentric models.